We do have our favorite but surely wouldn’t mind if Thomas Pynchon won the Nobel Prize too . . . and in Episode 32 we finish off 2025 by considering Shadow Ticket, the noir detective take on the 1930s by a writer who was surely a key influence on the early DeLillo (we read from an unpublished DeLillo letter summarizing that relationship) but who also seems to have been reading works like Running Dog over the years (or so we imagine in unpacking Shadow Ticket scenes invoking Chaplin and a “German Political Celebrity” named Hitler). We try to understand how Pynchon’s latest examination of historical and potential fascism works in its 1932 setting, ranging from Milwaukee to Hungary, where reluctant protagonist and “sentimental ape” and “sap” Hicks McTaggart keeps adding on to his P.I. “tickets” in a strange search for a Wisconsin heiress and her Jewish musician lover but also what might ultimately be justice (a far from simple thing). Shadow Ticket is loads of serious fun, where Pynchon manages to examine the direst of turning points amidst scenes of bowling alley and motorcycle lore, dairy strikes, Prohibition’s black markets, dance hall and speakeasy glamour, and something called “Radio-Cheez.” Bela Lugosi, vampires, a beautiful pig in a sidecar, and some of the most tasteless lamps in the world also play a role. The real content here for Hicks, though, is the prospect of spiritual and other forms of peace in a world where weapons from clubs to guns and submarines operate according to mysterious laws of “apport” and “asport,” occult material that interweaves with Hicks’s strike-breaking past and raises connections to Gravity’s Rainbow. Is Hicks’s fellow orphan and young protégé Skeet Wheeler the father of Vineland’s Zoyd, headed out to California as the novel ends? What’s the meaning of Hicks failing to return to his home country, and what does cheese gangster Bruno Airmont’s submarine fate have to do with Bleeding Edge? Are Hungary’s shifting borders a new kind of “Zone”? What’s going on in the novel’s many Statue of Liberty references and its anachronistic allusions to a “Face Tube” for flirtation in bars? And how does this always funny writer, now in his late eighties, keep coming up with all these absurd songs (we sing some) and hilarious mock-movies like the one featuring “Squeezita Thickly” swimming in soup pots (Shirley Temple, is that you?)? Teasing out many connections to Gravity’s Rainbow, Against the Day, and Vineland, this episode makes reference to just about all of Pynchon’s other works, including even V. and his earliest short stories. At the same time, you need come to it with nothing but an interest in Pynchon’s life and work. We doubt that we get every reference to history or previous Pynchon right or mount interpretations we won’t later want to revise, but on this brand-new and captivating late work from a masterful author, we hope in nearly three hours of deep conversation and laughter that we’ve made a good start on the many critical readings to come.